Health: Binge Eating - Teaching Your Home School Children About Eating Disorders
By Mimi Rothschild
When your home school child is around the age of 11 or 12, you can begin to teach him or her about eating disorders as part of your ongoing lessons about nutrition. One of the eating disorders that you can include when teaching about this subject is binge eating. A very young home school child would probably not be able to grasp the concept of binge eating, so this subject should be discussed with your home school child when he or she is old enough to understand that there can be psychological or physiological reasons for this and other eating disorders.
Although medical science is not completely sure about all the factors that contribute to binge eating disorder, you can still include this as a subject in your home school curriculum. You and your child can do research on the latest findings about binge eating, and you can have discussions about your child's opinions on the research. This is a great way to encourage your home school child to form opinions based on solid research, and to be willing to express these opinions to others. You and your home school student can also discuss what is known about binge eating. Mainly known is that there are symptoms that can confirm a diagnosis of binge eating disorder, and that the disorder can be very dangerous to a person's health.
Besides learning how to recognize symptoms of this disorder, your home school child can learn effective ways to avoid it. During a learning session, ask your child what he or she thinks may trigger binge eating in some people, and also ask him or her if he or she can think of ways that people can combat the disorder. When he or she brings up such things as "people may binge eat because they're sad", you and he or she can then discuss what other, more constructive and healthy things people can do to deal with their emotions.
Besides learning about eating disorders such as binge eating, your child will also be learning about coping with problems in healthy and constructive ways. This is a benefit of learning about eating disorders that he or she may not even realize. It is not necessary to "instruct" your child on how to make healthy choices. Through what she is learning she will pick this up on her own. Learning about binge eating and other eating disorders, and how to avoid these problems, will give your home school child a sense of confidence and empowerment that will help him or her as he or she grows into an adult.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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